Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 126210
Machine crash and Memory leak when copying a large 7G directory to another place
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:07:02 EST
Description of problem: Memory leak when copying a large 7G directory to the same disk or another disk. Machines freezes when repeat the copying process another time Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): Linux 2.4.21-15.ELsmp How reproducible: 100% Steps to Reproduce: 1.cp -r /7GB_large_directory 2.cp -r /7GB_large_directory 3. Actual results: Machine freezes Expected results: Additional info: WS3 on Dell P4 3.4GHz, 1.0G Mem, 2.0G Swap, 256M Video
Could you please attach console output with oops/panic data? Also, what file system type is supporting the target directory?
Ernie , How do I get the console output with oops/panic data? The machine is frozen and has to be hard rebooted by swith power off and on. Please advise. Thanks.
Created attachment 101658 [details] /var/log/messages
What's the status of this bug? I have a Dell 2650 with 3 GB RAM running RHAS3 kernel 2.4.21-20. When I copy using cp a ~ 1 GB file from one directory to another on the same disk, memory use goes up by about 1 GB and stays up even after the operation is done. I understand that the memory is used by a disk cache for later improved copy performance. But the memory never seems to get released and another large copy will use up all the memory, often causing a system hang (frozen screen). Does cp really have a memory leak for large files? I tried the following test: dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/testfile bs=1M count=1024 ; rm /tmp/testfile which I got from Bug 58681, and the memory used by this operation was freed up, but the memory used by the previous 1 GB cp is still shown as used.
Tony, please work with Customer Support to get the required data (and then attach it here). Also, please let us know if this problem occurs with a recent RHEL3 release (U5 or later). Thanks in advance. Reassigning to PeterS.